Rotary reel bars are widely used, in the reeling and winding of endless web material such as paper webs in the pulp and paper industry, and in printing.
In the paper making industry, where a wide paper web is generated at high speed as a continuous web, it is essential to provide reel bars in the winder section of the machine with a rotational capability, so that substantially uninterrupted reeling of the web can be maintained.
In the case of slitting machines, while the machine requirements may be somewhat less demanding in regard to the continuity of reel bar availability, the need to provide a reel bar drive is substantially the same.
Certain aspects of prior art reel bar drives may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 2,865,264 issued Dec. 23, 1958 to Moser; U.S. Pat. No. 3,140,620 issued Jul. 14, 1964 to Ferara; and, U.S. Pat. No. 3,889,892 issued Jun. 17, 1975 to Melead. Moser teaches the use of a slitter-scorer machine having a continuously driven fixed shaft with a rubber faced wheel such as an aircraft tire to engage a peripheral end portion of the reel bar. The arrangement is inflexible in that the drive arrangement is immobile moreover, the transmittable torque is limited by the single frictional contact of the wheel on the reel bar.
Ferara teaches the use of a timing belt having a toothed or cogged surface entrained in frictional driven relation with a main drive pulley in order to overcome the friction-limited provisions of Moser.
Melead illustrates certain of the aspects of reel bar positioning and transfer that may be embodied in a winding apparatus.
The reel bar drive arrangements of Moser and Ferara are handicapped in use by their complexity and inflexibility, and in the case of Moser, by the limited torque transfer capability of a single driving surface.